Ahmed Forouk

Here is young economist Ahmed Forouk with his child, now 18 months old. Ahmed died yesterday from tear gas inhalation after coughing for an entire day.

The gas was manufactured by Combined Tactical Systems in Jamestown, Pennsylvania. If you pay U.S. taxes, as I do, then you paid for a small portion of the gas that killed him.

completed drafts are good

Haven’t done a writing advice post for awhile, and a certain percentage of readers really seem to like them, so here goes. This one is an oldie but a goodie.

I have to finish something this weekend, and am not happy with any of the first 19 pages so far. By mid-afternoon I will have 26 or 27 pages that I’m not happy with.

The point is, as long as you have 26 or 27 pages, you can make yourself happy with them after no more than a few hours’ editing work. The alternative is to become obsessed with exquisite crafting paragraph by paragraph, and the problem with this (I always used to do it in my twenties) is that it casts shadows of anxiety and gloom over your entire life, because you’re moving so slowly and can’t be sure if you will finish on time. And then you can’t help extrapolating while looking ahead to your entire future and seeing decades more of the same unproductivity.

It’s better to have a certain bulk of pages, then work on those pages. As long as everything is on paper, and in roughly the right order (your unconscious tends to put things in pretty good order by itself), things will work out.

When you have that certain number of pages, there’s another benefit. You can also print them, and take them somewhere else and mark them up with red ink. You won’t be a slave to your usual work location any longer, but will have some mobility, and with mobility comes increased mental energy and an improved mood.

Maintaining high morale is always the key on projects of this sort. If you have that, you can overcome many obstacles.

Laureano Ralon interviews William Leiss

The interesting series of Figure/Ground interviews continues. HERE.

Mohamed Mahmoud video

Brutal video from the area from yesterday (except for the part with the clubbing of civilians, which happened a few days ago, and the night conversation between the police official and the protestors, which is stamped November 20).

From about 3:00 or 4:00 to the end, it’s non-stop video of police firing all over the street, which I know as well as the street I grew up on. It’s very disturbing. You can see a sniper on the roof of Bon Appetit café, where I usually go for a harmless coffee and ice cream sundae when in the area, or sometimes a bowl of pasta. Now it’s literally a war zone on that street, though oddly, Tahrir itself remains fine. Even the tear gas is gone from there now.

Incidentally, there’s also a pet shop next door to the Bon Appetit, and no one knows if the animals were ever taken out. I hope they were.

birds of South Africa

One of today’s wordpress featured blogs has a number of outstanding bird photos from South Africa’s Kruger National Park. You may enjoy it as I did. HERE.

back on Twitter

As “DrZamalek”

I got sick of both Facebook and Twitter at around the same time in the first half of 2010, and pulled out of both.

What brought me back to Facebook was simply the January Egyptian Revolution. The information I wanted, such as photos of the dead, was best obtained via Facebook from my Egyptian friends.

Now I have to go back on Twitter because of what’s happening in Egypt. I’ve found that all of the live feeds, including al-Jazeera, are maddeningly slow.

The best way to keep abreast of developments in Egypt is to do searches on Twitter for #Tahrir, #MohamedMahmoud, and so forth. But of course you have to be cautious, because there’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people who seem to be eyewitnesses who are actually just repeating rumors they heard, and so forth. Nonetheless, it’s the best raw source of real-time information, so I have to go back into the fray.

correlationism and Hegelianism

Someone forwarded an article which claims that “correlationism” is not a new concept, for the reason that people have been combatting Hegelianism for nearly two centuries. And moreover, that anyone who doesn’t realize this doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about when it comes to the history of philosophy. Quick response:

1. Hegelianism is absolute idealism, not correlationism. Kant is a correlationist, not Hegel. Knowing the difference between Kant and Hegel is one of the keys to reaching an initial basic grasp of the history of modern philosophy.

2. What makes correlationism such a useful term (and Meillassoux deserves credit for this) is that there wasn’t previously a bulk name for the sort of philosophy it describes: the kind that avoids idealism simply by pointing to a real that exists however only in a pair with the human subject. The term “correlationism” is a very good way of identifying this particular repeated dodge of the realism/idealism question.

Phenomenology, a school I love, is unfortunately the greatest sanctuary of correlationist arguments in recent philosophy. But I also hold that phenomenology has a lot more going for it than Meillassoux thinks. It’s not just about “description,” as he says, but about a gap between objects and their qualities within the sensual realm, which overturns the entire “bundle of qualities” model and makes sensuous experience an object-oriented kingdom for surely the first time in the history of philosophy.

To return to the “correlationism” point… I was using the phrase “the philosophy of access” since probably the late 1990’s, but “correlationism” is simply a better term for it (concise, snappy, and etymologically superior) so I only use Meillassoux’s term now.

Lynn Margulis dies

I guess this happened yesterday, though I only heard about it now. Click HERE.

Reading Symbiotic Planet was a great experience for me. I read it during my final year in Chicago, at the behest of Alphonso Lingis, who also loved it.

a bit of bank panic

All the ATM’s were out of order in Cairo last night. Today I went into the campus bank to make a deposit, and I was 105th in line. No, I didn’t wait. I’m just going to go back to check every half hour or so.

Everyone is making mildly panicked withdrawals, not knowing if there will be another bank shutdown. And actually, I have almost no cash on hand at the moment, so perhaps I’ll be eating canned food all of next week.

a few differences between now and Mubarak

I’m generally on board with the critique that “nothing has changed” since the Revolution. There’s a lot of truth to that notion.

However, it’s also a slight exaggeration. There have been some changes, some good and some bad, and they go roughly like this:

1. The climate is not as fearful. One generally feels more comfortable mouthing off about SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) than about Mubarak.

2. Much more freedom of the press. Newspapers take a lot more risks now.

3. Crime is a bit worse, though still not that bad. Any Western city will still have a higher crime rate than Cairo right now, I believe.

4. Most importantly, people now know they can fight back. The burden of fear has shifted onto the regime somewhat. For the first time, they have to worry about the public reaction, and that’s why they’re limiting themselves to killing 15-20 protestors per day rather than trying a massive Tahrir clearance operation.

Geographically, it’s the government that is on the defensive right now. The protestors have all the strategic depth. Not only do they have Tahrir, they have everything surrounding Tahrir. You can walk straight into Tahrir with no trouble at all, even as a foreigner; you will only meet protestor gatekeepers, not any police or Army. The protestors are able to deliver supplies into Tahrir at will, from what I can see.

By contrast, the government is pinned in in those few blocks surrounding the Ministry of the Interior. (Which may mean Ministry of National Parks and Wildlife in the USA, but it means Ministry of Domestic Oppression in Egypt as in many other countries.)